The awk command can make it easy to remove duplicate characters from a string even when those characters aren’t sequential, especially when the process is turned into a script. First, the awk command ...

awk does a lot of common work for you when you use it to process text files. It reads files a record at a time. Normally, a record is a single line. Then it splits the line on fields using whitespace, ...

The first command we’ll examine in this post is a very unusual awk command that systematically removes every line in the file that is encountered more than once. It leaves the first instance of the ...

I've used command lines at the prompt, but I never, ever trust someone who makes a big show of typing them from memory. For every time they get it right, they screw something up in their pointless ...

awk is a programming language optimized for text processing. It takes less code than sed or perl, where the input is field-based. bash and other interactive shells don't have the same capabilities ...

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into interesting programming languages. In the past we have spoken to Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language, Don Syme, senior ...